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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25888297">The Steam Type and Machine Works</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapsedge/pseuds/mapsedge'>mapsedge</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>No Fandom</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>GISH, GISH inspired, Gen, Historical References, Historically Inspired, Humor, Minor Character Death, Steampunk</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 10:42:25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,607</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25888297</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapsedge/pseuds/mapsedge</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
      <p>This short story was inspired by a challenge that was part of GISHWHES 2020, something along the lines of "a hand operated laptop". I started to frame a story around some of the images that created in my head and it eventually grew into what you read here. Blame my wife.</p>
    </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Steam Type and Machine Works</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This short story was inspired by a challenge that was part of GISHWHES 2020, something along the lines of "a hand operated laptop". I started to frame a story around some of the images that created in my head and it eventually grew into what you read here. Blame my wife.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>The Steam Type and Machine Works, #23 Kendall Street, North Bottoms</b>
</p><p>By Bill Morris</p><p> </p><p>It was a time of glorious innovation.</p><p>The steam engine was revolutionizing industry, creating factories full of automated machines that toiled night and day without rest, without meals, without complaining. So long as the great fireboxes were fed, the steam from the great boilers kept the wheels turning, the belts humming, the machines churning.</p><p>The typewriter was revolutionizing communication, making it possible to record one’s thoughts almost as fast as they could appear. A skilled typist could write a letter in a few minutes that would have taken some quantity of hours to write via quill and ink, no blotting or sanding required!</p><p>It was an innovatively glorious time to be alive.</p><p>The Steam Mechanics and Machine Works of #23 Kendall Street, North Bottoms, was the first to combine the two Great Inventions. As it happens also the last, but we are not yet to that point in our story.</p><p>With The War winding down, production of gun stocks, caissons, and tent pegs ground to a halt, and Mr. Warwick Kendall, the namesake of the aforementioned Kendall Street and a Great Man of Industry, needed to find some new device to keep his factory, the aforementioned Steam Mechanics and Machine Works of #23 Kendall Street, North Bottoms, busy.</p><p>He thought long and hard about it. He consulted the daily papers and broadsides. He consulted his nephew (who plays no significant part in the story and thus will never be heard from again on these pages). He consulted the smoky sky outside his fifth floor office window in his building at #17 Kendall Street, North Bottoms.</p><p>He thought of consulting his foreman, but the telephone wasn’t yet invented for common use, and the idea of walking the five blocks to The Steam Mechanics and Machine Works of #23 Kendall Street, North Bottoms, seemed too...well...gauche.</p><p>He gazed down at the street below and saw a boy leaning idly against a gas lamp pole. The boy was a ‘runner’, a young man that for a few pennies would deliver messages or small packages, and he was waiting for engagement.</p><p>It was in this moment that an idea struck Mr. Warwick Kendall, and as such ideas often do it disabled entirely his ability to Consider The Consequences. He clapped his hands together at the brilliance of the -- no. The brilliance of HIS idea.</p><p>He threw open the sash of his window and called down to the boy.</p><p> </p><p>“He wants us to what?” Bob The Sub-Foreman asked, his mouth agape. “Read it again.”</p><p>Angus the Foreman (none of Mr. Warwick Kendall’s employees had last names, so far as he knew), cleared his throat.</p><p>----------</p><p>That long distance communication may be better facilitated between my office at Nbr. 17 K St and The S M and M W of Nbr. 23 K St, NB, you are to dedicate your efforts to the production of a large, steam-driven typewriter. The device, when operated, should create letters a foot high and readable from some distance.</p><p>This to be done with all haste, sparing no expense.</p><p>Mr.W.K,esq.</p><p>----------</p><p> </p><p>“That will be something,” the boy said.</p><p> </p><p>On a morning a month later, the sign above the enormous iron entrance gate of the factory was replaced. It now read</p><p>The Steam Type and Machine Works</p><p>After a month of sleepless nights, double-shifts, thousands of rivets, lots of pounding, and a great deal of unseemly language, the Great Innovation, the Steam Typewriter, gleamed in the warm light of sunrise, small motes of dust making an eldritch glitter in the air around it. The oily smell of warm metal suffused the space.</p><p>Angus the Foreman stood before the keyboard, which was waist high and twelve feet wide.</p><p>Bob The Sub-Foreman stood beside him.</p><p>The boy stood a safe distance away.</p><p>They stood some more.</p><p>Bob The Sub-Foreman cleared his throat. “What shall we--”</p><p>“I’m thinking,” Angus the Foreman interrupted him.</p><p>They stood.</p><p>Angus the Foreman drew in a breath. “ELMER!” he bellowed.</p><p>On the floor above their heads, there was the sound of something heavy falling to the wooden planks. There was the sound of chair legs screeching. There was the sound of hurrying footsteps. There was the sound of someone tripping down a flight of steps.</p><p>Shortly, Elmer was there, rubbing his right shin.</p><p>“Yes sir?” he asked.</p><p>Angus the Foreman smiled down at the young man. Elmer Kendall was the grandson of Mr. Warwick Kendall, and thus was to be treated with no small amount of deference in spite of him being a boggle-minded idiot.</p><p>“Elmer,” Angus the Foreman said, “Mr. Warwick Kendall is your grandfather, is he not?”</p><p>“Oh, yes sir!” Elmer nodded. “You see my mother was Mr. Warwick Kendall’s daughter and when she married and she and her husband had a baby and that baby was me and so that made Mr. Warwick Kendall my grand father by virtue of him being my mom’s dad and all.”</p><p>The sound of grinding teeth was audible in the large room. Angus the Foreman relaxed his jaw.</p><p>“Good. That’s good. I should like you to write a letter to him, to tell him that the Steam Typewriter is finished.”</p><p>Elmer nodded eagerly. “Uh huh. Then what?”</p><p>“Then what?” said the boy.</p><p>“Yeah, then what?” said Bob The Sub-Foreman.</p><p>Angus the Foreman’s teeth were suffering greatly this morning.</p><p>“We will then type that letter into the Steam Typewriter and hoist it to the top of the building - THIS building,” he interrupted himself before Elmer could ask, “so that your grandfather may read it.”</p><p>Without a word, for which Angus the Foreman was exceedingly grateful, Elmer took a sheet of paper from a nearby desk, dipped a metal tipped pen into a well of ink and wrote:</p><p> </p><p>----------</p><p>Dear Grandad,</p><p>The Grate Steem Typeriter is dunne!</p><p>Elmer</p><p>----------</p><p> </p><p>Elmer folded the paper into absolutely precise thirds and asked, “Would you like me to deliver it to him?”</p><p>“Hey!” the boy said, who had been waiting as always for engagement.</p><p>“No,” Angus the Foreman said through gritted teeth. “I’ll take the letter --”</p><p>“To my grand-dad?”</p><p>“--to the Steam Typewriter and type in the message.”</p><p>“This is going to be something,” the boy said.</p><p> </p><p>The fires were lit under the great bronze boiler, eight feet high and twenty feet long, a salvage from a wrecked steamship. Angus and his men had affixed a flywheel, twelve feet across, and a lever to engage the belts to run the machinery on the floors above. The needle on the pressure gauge rose slowly, and finally reached the mark labeled</p><p>FULL STEAM</p><p>On the next floor up, Angus the Foreman stood before the keyboard, a large construction the size of four well-appointed desks. Twenty-five letters and a space bar, everyone in the factory having agreed unanimously that “Q” was wholly unnecessary. Directly in front of him were the letters “B” and “N”, and a spacebar large enough to comfortably sleep on.</p><p>Bob The Sub-Foreman, newly promoted to Bob the Inker, stood inside the machine with a small roller and tray of ink.</p><p>Behind him had been raised a large sheet of white fabric, the size of the side of a circus tent.</p><p>Bob the Newly Promoted Inker cleared his throat.</p><p>“How is this supposed to work again?”</p><p>Angus the Foreman called, “As the letter rises on the end of its hammer, you spread the ink onto the letter. The hammer will continue forward and impress the letter onto the cloth behind you.”</p><p>“Ah.” Bob the Newly Promoted Inker said.</p><p>On the floor below, the fireman knocked on the side of the boiler with a wrench, three times. CLANK. CLANK. CLANK. The great bronze boiler was ready.</p><p>Angus the Foreman called out, “Are you ready?”</p><p>Bob the Newly Promoted Inker’s voice muffled out, “Ready!”</p><p>Burt the Lever Puller (who plays no other part in this story) took firm hold of the chest-high lever in front of him, squeezed the safety release clamp, and pulled the lever in its long arc toward his chest. Above all their heads, the leather belts, some as wide as two feet!, engaged with the many pulleys. There was a hiss as the leather found its grip, then a steady, rhythmic “chnk chnk chnk” sound as the joins in the belts passed over the pulleys. Long shafts carried the motion to other pulleys, then to the machines. To THE machine.</p><p>The Steam Typewriter began to hum.</p><p>Angus the Foreman consulted Elmer’s letter, hanging on a post beside him.</p><p> </p><p>----------</p><p>Dear Grandad</p><p>----------</p><p> </p><p>Angus the Foreman took a deep breath.</p><p>Bob the Newly Promoted Inker spread fresh ink onto his roller, squared his shoulders and set his feet.</p><p>Angus the Foreman laid both hands on the “D” key ... and pushed.</p><p>Several things happened nearly simultaneously. First was the “hiss” as the belts tightened inside the machine. Then a loud “POP” as the letter on the end of its long hammer passed through the speed of sound on its ascent. Then a red “D” appeared on the fabric. After a slight pause, the hammer settled gently back down into its track.</p><p>Of Bob the Formerly Newly Promoted Inker, the only remaining proof that he ever existed was a large, spreading, red puddle in front of the circus-tent-sized cloth.</p><p>“That was something,” said the boy.</p><p> </p><p>Hank the Inker Newly Promoted from Machinist, dressed in his usual tweed suit and bowler hat, had the benefit of Bob the Formerly Newly Promoted Inker’s experience. Angus the Foreman told him, “Stand here,” he pointed, “so that the letter doesn’t hit you on it’s way up.”</p><p>The pressure was dialed back a bit on the great bronze boiler. The fireman knocked on the side of the boiler with a wrench, three times. Burt the Lever Puller pulled the lever.</p><p>The Steam Typewriter began to hum.</p><p>Angus the Foreman once again consulted Elmer’s letter.</p><p> </p><p>----------</p><p>Dear Grandad</p><p>----------</p><p> </p><p>There was a foot-high “D” on the cloth already. So far so good. Except for Bob. The price one pays for Glorious Innovation.</p><p>Angus the Foreman called out, “Are you ready?”</p><p>Hank the Inker’s voice came from inside the machine, “Ready!”</p><p>“You’re standing where I showed you?” Angus the Foreman asked.</p><p>Hank the Inker’s voice came from inside the machine, “Yes!”</p><p>Angus the Foreman laid his hands on the “E” … and pushed.</p><p>The letter on the end of its long hammer did not hit Hank the Inker in the head. As it happened, he was standing on the end of the hammer itself, which, being as it was a very long lever on a very short fulcrum, acted now as a catapult.</p><p>A Hank the Inker-sized hole appeared in the fabric, followed a fraction of a second later by the sound of breaking window glass, followed a somewhat larger fraction of a second after that by a sound very like a two-hundred pound bag of boiled potatoes dressed in a tweed suit and black bowler hat landing in the vacant lot a block away and two floors down.</p><p>“Yes. That was something,” the boy said.</p><p> </p><p>The pressure on the great bronze boiler was dialed further back. The dampers on the firebox were closed. The needle on the pressure gauge hovered just below the mark labeled</p><p>Barely Adequate</p><p>A new circus-tent-sized cloth was hung.</p><p>The machine hummed.</p><p>Floyd the Inker Newly Promoted from Innocent Bystander stood inside the machine with the roller and ink tray.</p><p>Angus the Foreman called out, “Are you ready?”</p><p>Floyd the Inker, feeling a breeze from a nearby broken window and staring at a large red stain on the floor, called back, “For what, exactly?”</p><p>Angus the Foreman consulted Elmer’s letter.</p><p> </p><p>----------</p><p>Dear Grandad</p><p>----------</p><p> </p><p>Angus the Foreman squared his shoulders, laid his hands on the “D” key … and pushed.</p><p>Inside the machine, the humming grew only a little louder, and the letter rose on the end of its hammer, gliding smoothly upward in a slow arc of gleaming, oily metal. Floyd the Inker rolled his roller across the letter and stepped back, and gently, so very gently, the foot-high letter on the end of its hammer kissed the cloth, leaving behind a perfect</p><p>D</p><p>The letter came away from the fabric with a soft kissing noise, as of a lover regretting to part, longing for the touch of fond lips never to end.</p><p>The hammer settled back into its track, sighing, a traveller returning to its warm home after a long and exhausting journey. The humming subsided.</p><p>Floyd wept softly at the mechanical beauty of it. That he had been witness to such metallic perfection, a lowly Innocent Bystander no more, but a hero of the industrial age. No...no...of Glorious Innovation.</p><p>He wiped his cheeks with a sleeved forearm, and called out, “Next!”</p><p>Angus laid his hands on the “E” key … and pushed.</p><p>The humming got a little louder, the letter rose, Floyd inked, the letter and fabric kissed, the hammer settled back.</p><p>E</p><p>“I can’t believe it,” Floyd the Inker said.</p><p>“My god,” Angus the Foreman said.</p><p>“That’s something,” the boy said.</p><p>“Seems kinda slow,” Elmer said.</p><p>Angus the Foreman turned and stared at him.</p><p>“I mean,” Elmer continued, “I could just take that piece of paper there and run it over to ma grand-dad. You know. My mom’s father, that grand-dad. Down to #17 Kendall Street.”</p><p>Angus the Foreman was very close to becoming Angus the Murder Suspect.</p><p>“Think you’ve got a handle on the first line, there?” Elmer asked, unpinning his letter.</p><p>Angus the Foreman, not trusting himself to speak, nodded.</p><p>Elmer once again folded the letter into precise threes, handed it to the boy.</p><p>“Run this up, okay?” and handed the boy a nickel. The boy vanished out the door.</p><p>Elmer turned back to Angus the Foreman. “Pretty amazing though if you ask me, the way it does all that machine stuff. Up up up”, he lifted his arm slowly in an arc mimicking the Steam Typewriter’s hammer, “and just like that, a letter on the sheet.”</p><p>Angus the Foreman studied the inside of his eyelids and wondered vaguely what prison would be like.</p><p>“Well,” Elmer mused, “Not JUST like that. I mean, it takes a bit, don’t it?”</p><p>Elmer suddenly looked embarrassed. “Oh!” he said, “I’m interrupting. I do that. Sorry. Keep going. Didn’t mean to get in the way!” He took a step backward and gestured grandly at the keyboard of the Steam Typewriter. “Mm...carry on! Uh...tally-ho!”</p><p>Relieved, Angus the Foreman returned to the keyboard and tally-ho’d the “A” key.</p><p>Humming...letter rising...inking...kissing...returning.</p><p>The long cam shafts that powered all the belts on the second and third floors spun almost silently in their well lubricated bearings. The leather belts hissed and “chnk chnk chnk”’d over the pulleys. A floor below, the relief valve on the great bronze boiler opened a fraction and exhausted some steam. The fireman took a sip from a cup of tea he’d been warming on the firebox.</p><p>Angus the Foreman pushed the “R” key.</p><p>Hum...letter...ink...kiss...return.</p><p>“Message from Mr. Warwick Kendall of #17 Kendall Street,” the boy said.</p><p>Elmer smiled at the boy, encouragingly. “You’re very quick.”</p><p>“Takes no time at all,” the boy said.</p><p>Elmer opened the letter.</p><p>Elmer read out loud</p><p> </p><p>----------</p><p>Make sure to include the @ sign on your keyboard. We might need it. Give the boy an extra nickel.</p><p>Mr.W.K,esq.</p><p>----------</p><p> </p><p>Elmer handed the letter to Angus the Foreman.</p><p>“Sorry,” Elmer said, “this is for you, actually. It's from ma grand-dad down at 17. I’ll be upstairs if you need me.”</p><p> </p><p>August 2, 2020</p>
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